1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to a decoding apparatus, and more particularly, to a decoding apparatus for digital communications and a method for using the same.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Concatenated codes are widely used for error correction of digital communication systems. The concatenated codes are based on outer Reed-Solomon codes and inner convolutional codes.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a conventional digital communication system 100 which uses concatenated Reed-Solomon codes and convolutional codes.
Referring to FIG. 1, a transmitting terminal of the conventional digital communication system 100 processes an input bit stream BS_IN, using a Reed-Solomon encoder 110, an interleaver 120, a convolutional encoder 130, and a modulator 140. The processed bit stream is transmitted through a channel 150. A receiving terminal of the conventional digital communication system 100 receives the transmitted bit stream and generates a decoding bit stream BSDEC using a demodulator 160 and a concatenated decoder 200.
FIG. 2 is a detailed block diagram of the concatenated decoder 200 illustrated in FIG. 1.
Referring to FIG. 2, the concatenated decoder 200 included in the conventional digital communication system 100 decodes a received bit stream using a Soft-Input Viterbi decoder 210, a deinterleaver 220, and a hard-decision Reed-Solomon decoder 230, and generates a decoding bit stream BS_DEC.
However, the concatenated decoder 200 included in the conventional digital communication system 100 cannot sufficiently use the error correction performance of concatenated Reed-Solomon codes and concatenated convolutional codes (hereinafter, referred to as concatenated RSC codes).